16 Partha Chatterji on Derivative Nationalism

Shashwati

1.      Introduction

The history of nationalism in post-colonial societies has been put to critical reading by both Western and non-western scholars. Refuting any unilinear development as informed by the logic of post-Enlightenment rationality, the history of the process of evolution of nationalism in such societies is rendered complex by their colonial pasts. The common-most framework to view the development of nationalist politics in the third world is contained in its definition as a ‘derivative’ discourse. In the works like Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1993) a critical exposition of the liberal theory of nationalism is included, that identifies nationalism in colonized non-European contexts with being primarily a derivative of the ‘modular’ or ‘classical’ type which found its origin in European history. In a similar vein, Dipesh Chakrabarty (1999), in his article, Nation and Imagination, talks about expanding the narrow confines of Europe-sponsored nationalism ‘imagination’ by including the heterogeneous practices and experiences of colonial societies. In works on the liberal idea of nationalism, like The Idea of Nationalism by Hans Kohn (1944) and Two Types of Nationalism by John Plamenatz (1976), a common theme is that with colonization, the ideas of the modular variant of European nationalism were transferred to colonies, which adopted the ideological framework of such a discourse to frame their own nationalist struggle against the colonial rule.

However, as has been said before, the transference of a pure, political idea like nationalism, from a European context to that of a colonial society, raises a set of complexities. Again, to consider the liberal accounts of nationalist theory, for example, Ernst Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) where he talks about the idea of ‘nationalism’ as a modern concept born out of the cultural and social transformations fostered by industrialization in Western countries, it is assumed that those very basic conditions which made nationalism a successful ideology in the West, like the progressive forces of industrialism, representative democracy and the culture of ‘rationality’, were missing in colonial societies, because of which, the resultant nationalism in these contexts was impure and of a deviant nature. The assumed ‘deviant’ nature of third world nationalism in such accounts is a simultaneous reference to a range of things, most highlighted of which is that given the ‘special’ historical conditions of colonial countries, these societies lack the inherent capacity to successfully cover the path towards modernity. Therefore, the dominant narrative of nationalism in former colonial societies has been one of how it is ‘different’ from the mainstream western idea of, as Chatterjee (1986) puts it, the ‘normal’ type of nationalism.

The assumed and often essentialized dichotomy between the so-called ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ or ‘non-western’ types of nationalisms, needless to say, is built upon the politics of racialism. The elements of ‘traditionalism’, ‘irrational’ or fundamental politics taken as sociological attributes of a colonial society was made a basis to deny any sense of nationalism or self-determination to the colonized. Based on an analysis of works like Theories of Nationalism by Anthony D. Smith (1971), and more recently, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), Partha Chatterjee (1998) says that there exists a tendency to over-simplify what otherwise is a complex and dialectical process of growth of nationalist consciousness among the people in colonial societies. In addition, the conventional understanding of intellectual premises of a nationalist discourse is pressed into service to prove how third world nationalisms are not equipped to taken upon themselves the pressures of the historical project of modernization and progress. Therefore as Chatterjee puts it, any creative element of nationalisms in countries of Asia and Africa is denied recognition in mainstream theories of nationalism, by dubbing their development as merely an evolutionary ‘variant’ of the mainstream model of western nationalism.

Partha Chatterjee’s own observation is that the nationalisms of the third world cannot be reduced to being merely ‘derivative’ of a western idea. In the introduction to his work, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (1993), Chatterjee puts forth some essential ways in which colonial nationalisms put forth their unique confrontation: they challenged the stereotypical claim that the colonized were naturally un-endowed with any capacity to rule themselves and, through their respective nationalist movements, ideas and consciousness, the colonized displayed a simultaneous potential to also ‘modernize’ themselves, in turn challenging, the so-called exclusivity of the power bases of western colonial rulers. However, Chatterjee maintains that both these observations point to a very crucial aspect of third world nationalisms, that is, there complex nature. For example, in the critical works like Asok Sen’s Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and His Elusive Milestones (1977) and Sumit Sarkar’s Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past (1975) on early social reformers in colonial India like Raja Rammohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a running theme is that anti-colonial nationalisms steadfastly proved the falsity of the assumed dichotomy between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ or ‘eastern’ nationalisms, yet on the other, there was a considerable degree of internalization of the western paradigms of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ in their project of national independence. In Chatterjee’s words, “Nationalism thus produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to potential domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based.” (1986)

Therefore, in his study of third world nationalisms with reference to the colonial society in India, Partha Chatterjee (1993) suggests that nationalism must be treated as an ideology, the political content of which was centered on creating an alternative discourse in opposition to the near-universal truth of colonialism. The politics of nationalism of the colonized society was far from being merely an outcome of working out of ‘objective’ historical processes. It was outright political in nature, whereby the entire anti-colonial national discourse was carefully formulated and framed, based on deliberations about possible alternatives that could be framed against the colonial discourse. As an element that was blindly denied by colonial masters, this is where the creative or innovative underpinnings of a nationalist ideology and politics in the colonized society like the Indian subcontinent were clearly visible. The historical process of evolution of nationalist thought in all its complexity was thus laid bare.

To get back to an earlier point, one of the defining attributes of third world nationalisms is the recurring aspect of what several scholars like Chatterjee call, contradictoriness. This contradiction is reflected primarily in the way in which the colonized society tries to frame its own, ‘indigenous’ brand of nationalism. Such an anti-colonial, national discourse was premised on a polemic critique of the colonial discourse of the Orient, embodied in the image of non-active, passive and non-sovereign colonized people and countries. Edward Said in his work Orientalism (1978) discusses at lengths how as an ‘object’ of study, the image of the Orient or the other was the main representational form whereby the colonial rulers made sense of colonized people, and also controlled them. Consequently, the discourse of Orientalism was accorded the status of a scientific and universal truth that legitimized the power of western colonizers over non-European people and cultures. This ‘problematic’ of the Orient in western colonial thought was challenged by third world nationalist discourse, which asserted that the representational category of the ‘Orient’ had a subjectivity which was self-produced, and therefore, was far from being passive or non-autonomous as projected in the colonial discourse. While the scientific, objective categories of western thought have tried to analyze the colonized mind, they had not been successful in controlling, or transforming it. Therefore, the sovereign, autonomous and active subjectivity of the colonized people was an authentic truth.

The essential ‘contradictoriness’ perceived to characterize third world nationalist discourses emerges in the fact that while on one hand, it asserts the subjectivity of the colonized people, especially reflected in the superiority of its moral, spiritual realm as against the corrupt materialism of the west, on the other hand, it adopts the same essentialist distinction between the East and West as employed in the colonial discourse to understand nationalist stirrings in colonized societies. Therefore, while the autonomous ‘subjectivity’ of the colonized people is asserted, the basic premise of the ‘objectifying’ processes of western science, especially the use of ‘ethnist typology’ to create a systematic body of knowledge for colonial consumption was never questioned (Chatterjee, 1986).

According to Partha Chatterjee (1993), the existent element of contradiction within the anti-colonial, nationalist thought as it emerged in colonial contexts has a crucial role to play in that it provides a terrain on which the different dynamics of the emerging nationalist thought are played out. It provides for expression of historical possibilities which otherwise are denied by the colonial rule. At the same time, the framework of emergent anti-colonial nationalism provides space for attempts to resolve the practical problems of realizing those historical possibilities, especially in keeping with the internal contradictions of the colonial society.

In all, what the anti-colonial, nationalist discourse attempted to do was to create its own framework of alternative ‘reason’ and ‘politics’ with which it could challenge the hegemonic power of colonial rule. However, in building that framework, it imbibed the same premises and ‘representational structure’ present in the colonial mode of thought. Therefore, on a political terrain, anti-colonial nationalism succeeded in creating, what Chatterjee (1986; 1993)) calls, a different discourse, challenging the colonial system of power. Yet this ‘difference’ was limited by its dependence on the discursive conditions set by the colonial mode of thought. This is where the paradoxical nature of nationalist thought in colonized societies comes to the fore.

As said earlier, Partha Chatterjee (1993) elucidates his analytical strategy to understand anti-colonial nationalisms of the third world in the context of colonial India. In the journey of emergence and consolidation of nationalism in the Indian context, he describes three ‘moments’: the ideological-political content in the thoughts of Bankimchandra, Gandhi and Nehru, which provide for the construction of the successive stages of nationalist discourse in India. In Bankim’s writings, we find the earliest traces of nationalist thought, which is successively displaced by Gandhian politics when the nationalist discourse stands on its own, later to enter a phase of full constitution as the identity of a post-colonial state in the making, as reflected in Nehruvian thought. Each of these moments represent not just a stage in the development of nationalist discourse in India, but also represent the tension, the contradiction that runs through the process of transference of an essential western political ideology to a colonial context. Each of these moments has been discussed subsequently in the chapter.

2.      Early Nationalist Thought: Bankimchandra and the Moment of Departure

Describing the history of constitution of nationalist discourse in colonial India, Chatterjee (1993) says that the modest origins were to be found in the development of a new class of intelligentsia that was a product of the colonial system itself, having made the most out of the ‘western’ system of education and consolidation of the professional administrative class that the British initiated here. It was by the nineteenth century that this class of professionals and intellectuals first encountered the new structure of law, administration and principles introduced by the colonizers, and were forced to formulate a response to the transforming structures and systems of the indigenous society. From a initial position of apprehension about the incomprehensibility of the new colonial language and impersonal procedures of the colonial rule, this new class of intelligentsia had come to adapt itself to the changing circumstances, familiarizing itself with not only the language but also with the colonial principles of administration and rule. This is recounted by Chatterjee as the main medium through which the discourse of nationalism was spread among the colonized people.

The implications of such a distinct process of spread of an essentially western idea among the colonized, through a class of intellectuals that owed its origins to the colonial structure, were many, and made up for the increasing complexity of nationalist thought in the country. First and foremost, there was a distinct reverence in the developing class of nationalist intelligentsia in nineteenth century colonial India, towards the European structure of reason and thought that helped the former to frame its own contours. The early nationalists like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay continued to display indebtedness to the Western values of modernity, rationality and ‘objective’ knowledge that opened their eyes to the very lack in their own culture which made domination of India possible. Consequently, the second important implication was the realization of severe shortcomings in the culture of Indians which made their colonization possible. For example, Bankim maintained that India was colonized because the Indians lacked a natural desire for autonomy; therefore, even before the advent of the British in India, the country had been consistently subjected to external conquests and rules, especially by Muslim invaders, and this was mainly because of the cultural failure on the part of Indians to understand the real basis of power in the real world. An additional reason for the subjection of Indian people was the apparent lack of solidarity among the Hindus, and a limited devotion to interests of the nation. It was only with the coming of the colonizers that Indians were exposed to true meanings of national liberation and solidarity.

Therefore, for Bankim, the essential ‘power’ of the western colonizers lay in their material and civilizational progress, while the essential ‘backwardness’ of the Indian community was based on its culture lack, described as an inept attitude and approach towards material power and force in real political world. In such an frame of thought as reflected in the literary texts of Bankim like Krsnacarita (1886), Chatterjee (1993) sees a internalization of colonial dichotomy between the West and the East, or between ‘material’ and ‘cultural’. For example, in Bankim’s thought, it was the mastery of the west over the real basis of power in the world, that is, material force, against which the cultural weakness of the Indians became explicit. Similarly, the western structure of reason and knowledge based on principles of objectivity, historicity, science and rationality made them superior to any other culture. Therefore, drawing upon the structure of Europe thought and reason, Bankim managed to highlight the missing, yet imperative, aspects in a culture that was desirous of liberty. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is the same aspects of European knowledge system that provided a frame of reference for Bankim to launch a critique of colonial subjection of India. Borrowing the same categories of rational and objective science of society provided in the colonial discourse, Bankim sought to prove the distortions of Indian history at the hands of the colonizers. Therefore, through a critique of Orientalist knowledge, Bankim tried to recover an ‘indigenous’ or ‘true’ historical ‘core’ of India, free of all distortions and fable-making; a history of the nation called India that stood the tests of historicity and objectivity as criteria of authentic science.

Through the recovery of an ‘original’ and ‘objective’ history of India, free of all distortions and manipulations, Bankim succeeded in two things: first, the real strength of India lay in its cultural and spiritual superiority as reflected in its original and authentic history; and second, the culture of India was capable of being reformed in order to prepare it for real world politics. Therefore, there was a critique in Bankim’s thought towards the assumed cultural immutability of the Indians; the culture of colonized India was as capable of ‘modernizing’ itself, so that it preserved what was distinctly Indian, while absorbing at the same time, the core values of the modern West. Therefore, according to Partha Chatterjee (1993), thus was the attempt to, what he terms as, translate the ‘modern’ into the ‘national’. The inherent tension between core definition of ‘modernity’ and that of ‘nationalism’ was sought to be resolved by a revivalist, regeneration of cultural identity of the colonized society, so as to make it fit the bill of modern criteria. By appealing to an authentic cultural history of India, Bankim’s case for ‘a return to the past’ must not be dubbed as a return to backward looking, conservative institutions of Hindu society. Rather, the attempt was to modernize and rationalize the cultural institutions of the Hindu society to make a departure from the assumed immutability of colonized subjectivity as codified in the colonial discourse.

3.      Gandhian Politics and the Nationalist Discourse: the Moment of Manoeuvre

Mahatma Gandhi’s intervention in the emergent nationalist movement in India has been described by Partha Chatterjee as representing the moment of manoeuvre, whereby the various points of conflict between the ideological-political content of anti-colonial, nationalist movement in the country and the realm of practical organizational politics was sought to be resolved or

temporarily suspended. The realm of ‘practical’ politics here refers to the structure of bourgeois politics, laws and institutions that framed the boundaries of nationalist politics in colonial India. The national movement was also a political movement, that is, it had to operate within the overall framework provided by institutional structure of the colonial state. As Chatterjee (1993) puts it, Gandhian thought provided for the ideological unity of very contradictory elements within the realm of the nationalist movement. On one hand the entire nationalist discourse in colonial context India was built upon the fact of its essential difference with worldview of the west, the main force behind it being the force of cultural or spiritual superiority of the colonized. Yet, on the other hand, the political aim of autonomy from colonial domination and self-rule borrowed heavily from the bourgeois liberal institutionalism and statecraft of the colonial discourse itself. In the context of such evident contradictions, Gandhi’s contribution to the nationalist discourse is seen primarily in the redefinition of the goal of national liberation along the lines of a moral utopia which was desirable but difficult to attain, but which provided space for a politics of accommodation, adjustments and compromise on path towards the ultimate attainment.

According to Chatterjee (1986; 1993), Gandhi’s ideological reconstruction of the goal of national liberation as swaraj took it much beyond the conventional understandings of nationalism. Unlike the nationalist leaders of his time, Gandhi’s critique was not merely directed at the colonial excesses in Indian society. Rather, the thoughts of Gandhi, when read in his works like Hind Swaraj (1910), were in the form of a critique of the fundamental aspects of civil society with its attendant ideas of rationality and progress through fast-paced industrialism and material development. Such a critique could be applied simultaneously against both, the colonial ideology as well as to the nationalist designs of post-independent state-building in India. For example, Anthony J. Parel in his work, Gandhi: ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings (1997) writes about Gandhi’s idea of true Swaraj; for Gandhi, Swaraj meant freedom from external, alien rule; but in addition, there was an ‘inner’ aspect of the goal of swaraj, which was freedom of mind from passions that control it, like greed, avarice, violence etc. Therefore attainment of swaraj was contained in not just freedom from British rule, but also in an individual moral and spiritual regeneration. As Raghavan N. Iyer in The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1973) chalks out in his writings, Gandhi’s ideological disdain towards western ideas of development and material progress that sustained on forces of competition and profit was reflected in his idealized imagination based on the relocation of the numerous villages in India as the basic unit of any kind of social, political and economic organization. According to Gandhi, a decentralized system of production through labor intensive and small-scale, village industries was probably the only recourse in a country of teeming millions, characterized by a chronic condition where productive labor far exceeded availability of sufficient employment.

According to Chatterjee (1993), Gandhi’s critique of fundamental aspects of modern civil society must not be reduced to being a kind of ‘romantic’ or ‘idealistic’ critique of excesses of western material civilization. Gandhi was much more than just a ‘peasant-intellectual’ who advocated the return to the harmony of a simplistic rural life, free of the evils of material consumerism and greed. Gandhi’s idealism had a political contribution to make in the construction of a nationalist state in India. The foremost contribution of Gandhian discourse was to forge an ideological unity within the framework of nationalist movement over and above the existent internal contradictions within Indian society. These internal contradictions in the form of divisions between different social classes in the complex and layered agrarian society in India, displaying varying degrees of inequity and discrimination, were probably the biggest roadblock in nationalist reconstruction of the nation. Therefore, the ‘peasant-communal’ tilt in Gandhian thought helped to realize a historical possibility, that is, of fostering an ideological unity between the subaltern, peasant classes and the elite nationalist sections in the course of a developing nationalistic struggle.

In important works like David Hardiman’s Gandhi in His Times and Ours (2003), there is included a critical analysis of Gandhian principle of trusteeship in the propertied class, and his condemnation of the jati system as a distortion of the principles of varna vyavstha. These very Gandhian formulations appear in the nationalistic history of the country as similar points of manoeuvre whereby Gandhi was able to reconcile the otherwise irreconcilable internal contradictions in pursuit of goal of national independence. The mobilization of the subaltern classes to rally behind the elite nationalist leadership which showed clear allegiance to bourgeois model of development was made possible only by the Gandhian politics.

4.      Nehruvian Nationalism and Passive Revolution: the Moment of Arrival

The entry of the process of reconstruction of nationalist discourse in India in its mature phase, when all the contradictions were smoothened out, has been termed as the moment of arrival in the life of the national state. Partha Chatterjee (1993) talks of this phase when the singular theme of the national state takes over the entire terrain of political and social life of the country. In the works of Benjamin Zachariah like Developing India, an Intellectual and Social History (2005), we get a glimpse of the Nehruvian model of nationalist development with its central ideas of national state, national development and equal citizenship rights to one and all irrespective of language, education, caste, sex and religion, that come to capture the attention of public imagination on the eve of independence in 1947. Such an arrival is most reflected in the Nehruvian politics, the outlines of which can be read in his works like The Discovery of India (1946) and An Autobiography (1936).

Along with it, comes the moment when the emergent national state, with all its trappings of modernity, comes face-to-face with its ‘inescapable other’ in the form of vast sections of peasantry that needed to be appropriated and mobilized in the elite-nationalist project of planned industrial development of the national economy. As discussed in his work, Development Planning and the Indian State (2010), Partha Chatterjee discusses the politics of passive revolution by the Indian ruling classes in post-independence India, played out to acquire legitimacy of the subaltern classes in the grand project of nation building and modernization.

The unfolding of the universal narrative of modern state in India was far from being a smooth process. Certain inescapable conditions posed as hindrances in its smooth transition. The conceptualization of a singular ‘national’ community had to look for ways to deal with pre-existing forms of communities and consciousness that existed among the colonized subject populations. Peasantry as a community- and often a rebellious one- was a specific problem which made their absorption in the nationalist anti-colonial struggle ever important. Peasantry as backward, superstitious and ignorant, unsuited to the dynamics of modern times was a perception shared by the colonizers and nationalists alike. Likewise, the identity of the class of peasantry as the trouble-maker because of its rebellious nature was another image internalized by both the colonialists and nationalists. Then there was the question of caste. Caste as a marker of the so-called traditional society in India, represented hierarchy, rigidity and backwardness, which threatened to deny the country, opportunities of modern self-governance. This was a widely held belief of the colonizers on the basis of which they justified their on hold over colonial India. For the nationalists, it was only proper to deny that caste was a core feature of Indian society. However, it was the institution of caste that made the Indian society essentially different form the West, and in such a perception, caste as an ideal system based on functional division of labor that brought order and stability in society was stressed upon. According to Chatterjee’s piece on peasantry and the nationalist movement in his book The Nation and its Fragments (1993), both positions of the nationalists concerning the caste question were well placed within the framework of modernity; liberal equality entrenched within bourgeois modernity called for a condemnation of oppressive caste practices, while the latter position maintained that caste in its ideal form was not incompatible with principles of universal modernity. The institution of caste as contributing to maintaining unity and stability of social order is, in the words of Chatterjee, a synthetic theory of caste. Synthetic theories of caste naturalize the condition of relation of dominance and subordination that constitute the principle of hierarchy between numerous castes. By stressing instead upon the ideology of dharma which determines the unity of mutual separateness and mutual dependence between jatis, such theories enable a continued reproduction of the caste system. The construction of a nationalist culture on basis of such synthetic theories of caste turns its back against an immanent critique of caste, which renders futile even formal recourse offered by the legal framework of bourgeois freedom and equal rights.

As far as the question of peasantry was concerned, the importance of appropriating the peasantry for rendering a mass appeal to the nationalist movement was recognized more than ever. However, the structure of peasant politics was way different from that of nationalist politics, which made such appropriation a difficult process for the nationalists. Peasant politics as the ‘other’ of the formal realm of national politics with roots in bourgeois institutional framework, often posed as a challenge before the latter. Therefore, the nationalists in their approach to the peasants were no different from the colonizers: the peasants were turned into ‘objects’ of their strategies, with no voice or agency of their own. This meant that as the peasants were sought to be appropriated within the new discourse of the nation, they were sheared off any consciousness of their own; any kind of mobilization among the peasantry was relegated to the cultural sphere, lacking organization and sense of politics. Peasants were persistently approached by the nationalists as the population that needs to be controlled and led, even if as a part of anti-colonial movement. This partly grew out of a deep-rooted sense of suspicion and distrust that the nationalist leadership harbored for the peasantry, supposedly ignorant and backward as they seemed to the former. The contours of the domain of bourgeois politics as adopted by the modernizing elite failed to grasp the specifics of peasant politics and consciousness. Therefore, as Chatterjee says, the historical narrative of modernity, and that of the modern state, refused to see the peasantry as active subject of history which placed considerable challenges before both colonial and nationalist historiographies by its forms of action and consciousness. The coming into being of a nation in the Indian context, involved a politics whereby the domain of politics of the peasants was kept invisible and detached from the concrete political processes, and hence denied any historical subjectivity.

5.      Conclusion

To conclude, the concept of ‘derivative nationalism’ reserved for anti-colonial nationalisms of third world countries by mainstream theorists of nationalism, remains contested. Reflective of a eurocentric bias in conceptualization of any kind of socio-cultural and political transformation in colonial contexts, such liberal perceptions serve to camouflage the complex nature of societal development in such societies. By treating ‘politics’ of anti-colonial nationalisms as a deviant of a purer form of (western) nationalism, the ‘agency’ of colonial societies is denied, removing the scope for any kind of ‘creative’ attempts on the part of such societies to shape their own politics. As a result, the various new challenges and questions thrown open to the conventional or western paradigm of understanding a science of society, are tamed, and thus nullified. Therefore, third world nationalisms present interesting cases of challenging the element of conformism that mainstream political theory has come to be beset with. However, the complex and dialectical process of evolution of anti-colonial nationalisms is a layered phenomenon. The development of nationalist discourse in colonial India is a case in point because while articulating itself in an essential difference with the colonizers’ culture, it also appropriates crucial intellectual premises of a same colonial power discourse to lend credence to its politics.

Further Reading

·         Chatterjee, P.. (1986). Transferring a Political Theory:  Early Nationalist Thought in  India. Economic and Political Weekly, 21(3), 120–128, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4375224

·      Chatterjee, P.. (1998). Beyond the Nation? Or within?. Social Text, (56), 57–69, http://doi.org/10.2307/466770

·         Chatterjee, P., & Chatterjee, P. (Eds.). (1995). A Modern Science of Politics for the Colonized, in P. Chatterjee & P. Chatterjee (Eds.), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (NED – New edition, pp. 93–117). University of Minnesota

·         Ramaswamy, S.. (1994). [Review of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse.]. The Journal of Asian Studies, 53(3), 960–961, http://doi.org/10.2307/2059782

·         Blackton, C. S.. (1990). [Review of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse]. The American Historical Review, 95(5), 1610–1610, http://doi.org/10.2307/2162863

·         Smith,  C.  C..  (1994).  [Review  of  Nationalist  Thought  and  the  Colonial  World:  A Deriative Discourse]. Utopian Studies, 5(1), 161–163, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719263

·      Chakrabarty, D.. (1987). Towards a Discourse on Nationalism [Review of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?]. Economic and Political Weekly, 22(28), 1137–1138, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4377215

·      Choudhary, S. K.. (1988). The ‘Elitism’ of Nationalist Discourse [Review of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse]. Social Scientist, 16(3), 41–46, http://doi.org/10.2307/3520198

·      Hardiman, D.. (1987). The Nationalist Trap [Review of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse]. Economic and Political Weekly, 22(3), 85–86, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4376563

·         Smith,  C.  C..  (1994).  [Review  of  Nationalist  Thought  and  the  Colonial  World:  A Derivative Discourse]. Utopian Studies, 5(1), 161–163, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719263

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